Rivera on the OL

[taylor made]

Both of our starting OTs are turning 30 next year and Cornelius Lucas has never started a full season in his career.  Our offensive line is getting low-key old and I'd be disappointed if they didn't address it early in the draft.

[offbyone]

4 hours ago, MKnight82 said:

I answered your question multiple times.

Just ribbing you a bit.  I respect your position.  I am really torn on the Scherff situation.  I don't think he has shown us elite play in a couple years so it is hard to rationalize giving him that contract.  If that scherff of old with his regular pancake blocks reappears then he is worth the contract.  It is just hard to know with the injuries adding up.

[e16bball]

On 1/14/2021 at 11:07 AM, offbyone said:

That is an unknown.  

Let me pose the Scherff quandary another way.  We basically tried him out this year for what his contract will be- 15M/year.  Do you feel like you got your 15M $ worth?

So this sorta gets to a point I’ve been making on and off for a few years now. In short, I’d rather pay $15M for $12M worth of production than pay $1M for $1M worth of production. The extreme concern about overpaying a player doesn’t get to me like it used to, or like it still does to many posters it seems.

Obviously, you can’t “overpay” at every position across the board. But they don’t award the Super Bowl to the team with the best bargains and the cleanest cap sheet. You have to have good players, elite players, to compete against the best teams.  Sometimes you have to pay more than you’d like to get/keep great players, but I think you have to do it — and then find other places on the roster where you can get surplus value, to make up for the perhaps excessive spending on the great player.

We are in a very good position cap-wise over the next couple seasons. Across the roster, we are getting valuable (surplus) production from guys who are on small/rookie deals — McLaurin, Gibson, McKissic, Thomas, Lucas, Payne, Young, Sweat, Holcomb, Curl, etc. These guys are all legit starters (or better) being paid a fraction of what they’d likely make on the open market right now. Our two biggest/most onerous contracts (Smith and Collins) are deals we can and likely will get out of in the next year or two. 

In other words, we are in a position where we can make a few large expenditures in order to add/keep high-level talent. Obviously we shouldn’t splurge like maniacs here, but we have the luxury of being able to prioritize “high-level production” over “bang for buck” to some degree. I think retaining the franchise’s first All-Pro in a quarter-century probably qualifies, even if it’s at a price that makes us all a little squeamish. 

[e16bball]

On 1/13/2021 at 12:22 PM, LoganF89 said:

With the amount of space we have and if smith retires or is cut I think if we sign him back we can honestly front load the heck out of his contract. May look crazy paying him in the 20s for the first year but in the following years his cap hit would be much lower and the Cap would go up earning us more flexibility in the future. 
 

for example let’s say Scherrf earns a 4 year deal worth an avg of 14 mill a season, it may look outrageous to give him 23 million in year 1 guaranteed with an avg of 11 mill over the next 3 season with most of the guaranteed money off the books.

So this is a really good idea, and it makes a lot of sense for a team like us that has some cap flexibility now but will likely find ourselves in more of a pinch 2-3 seasons from now. 

The problem with the idea, as I think we’ve seen it happen at times, comes when you get to that last year or two. That’s when you’re supposed to benefit — you paid out the big bucks up front, the player was loving it, everybody was happy, etc., and now it’s the team’s turn to profit with the lower salary in the back end. But the player starts to look around the league, and sees other guys at his position cashing in on market value deals, and he starts to get the feeling that he’s drastically underpaid (and underprotected with guarantees) for that last year or two.

So in this example, let’s fast forward to the offseason after year 2. At that point, the top of the OG market might be getting as high as $16-18M on long-term deals (say, 4/$66M with $35M guaranteed or something like that). But Scherff is sitting there with 2/$22M left on his contract, with most or all of the guaranteed money already paid out to him. Similar players to him are cashing in on monster deals, and he’s stuck in this deal with artificially low salaries during perhaps the last high-level years of his career. He and his agent are inevitably going to determine that it’s time to renegotiate and reach an extension that pays him like those other star guards — if not after year 2, absolutely after year 3. 

And just like that, all the benefit you were supposed to rake in during the latter part of the deal goes up in smoke. You’re looking at a dissatisfied star player/team leader, and the possibility of holdouts or trade demands if you don’t “value him” enough to tear up your team-favorable contract and do the market-value extension. I believe this is what happened with Trent Williams — the cancer thing was part of it, but the biggest part in my opinion was that he had come to the end of a deal that favored him initially and favored the team in the back end, and he didn't like it. Not fair pool, but he had the leverage.

Maybe Scherff is more grateful, and more of a team guy, and maybe he’d play out the contract in understanding of the fact that it was designed to favor him up front and the team in the back end. But it’s human nature to want whatever we can get, and I think it’s a rare player who would happily take the field with an artificially low salary instead of trying to leverage his way into something more lucrative (and approaching his fair market value). 

All of which is a long way of saying that it’s a very good idea cap-wise, in theory. But it doesn’t always work out in practice. They can and should probably try to weight it towards this season to some degree — but they’ve got to be careful not to overdo it or it could backfire on them.

[offbyone]

12 hours ago, e16bball said:

So this sorta gets to a point I’ve been making on and off for a few years now. In short, I’d rather pay $15M for $12M worth of production than pay $1M for $1M worth of production. The extreme concern about overpaying a player doesn’t get to me like it used to, or like it still does to many posters it seems.

That is well said.  I just can't play 15M for <10 of production on a position group that takes 5 starters every snap.

[turtle28]

15 hours ago, taylor made said:

Both of our starting OTs are turning 30 next year and Cornelius Lucas has never started a full season in his career.  Our offensive line is getting low-key old and I'd be disappointed if they didn't address it early in the draft.

I think they’ll address the OL. I also think people forget we have young OL too like Christian, Charles, Ismael & Sharpe. 
 

I definitely think if it’s BPA that they’ll take OL in round 1 whether that’s Leatherwood, Wyatt Davis or Darrisaw if they’re the BPA. If we don’t take them in round 1 I’d hope we take an OL in 2 or 3.

The way I look at it all though is that we could use an upgrade at least in depth at almost every position on our team but DL so, as long as they take the BPA I’ll be satisfied.